Check Out Our New Office Design

This winter, Fashionista moved out of its cozy cubbyhole at the SoHo office of its parent company, Breaking Media, and down the hall into its very own space.

The space, in theory, was great -- a penthouse-floor corner office with five windows looking over Broadway and Houston and plenty of square feet to house our staff -- but in reality, it needed a lot of work.

That's where Homepolish came in. The two-year-old design firm has gotten a reputation around town as the go-to for designing startup offices and apartments on a reasonable budget. In addition to our office, the company has also designed the offices of Gilt Groupe and The Man Repeller. We knew we were in good hands.

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Our designer, Danielle Arps, was told the office needed room to house six to eight full-time employees, two interns -- and a lot of beauty samples. The aesthetic was left up to her.

Danielle combed our old office and found inspiration in the things we had collected, like the colors of nail polish left on our desks, and also from our website. "I wanted it to be very 'fashion' in that you have a mix of patterns and texture and color that might not necessarily look like they'd work," she explains. She settled on a palette of white, brown and teal green, the last of which became half of our wall color (the other half of the office stayed white). After getting the color concept and 3D model approved by our CEO and office manager, she started ordering furniture.

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The first thing Arps wanted to buy was built-in bookshelves -- but those alone would have swallowed almost the entire budget. So Arps and her assistant found bookshelves on Wayfair, papered the backs with gold marbled wallpaper from Calico and -- to provide more storage -- mounted cabinet doors on the bottom half. The shelves she filled with fashion books, silver accents (including an owl, a winged pig and a silver vase), our beloved Karl Lagerfeld doll and our happy hour wine stash. She also placed canvas bags with labels for "lipstick" and "blush" so we could easily access products for stories.

The DIY activities didn't end there: Danielle also made us lamps from baskets found out at the Chelsea Flower Market, painted the outsides white and affixed lighting kits (total cost: $22). White desks were purchased new, and brown leather chairs were sourced from Craigslist. Next to the bookshelves was a lounge area that featured a pleasing mix of prints, including white and lavender Urban Outfitters chairs (now sold out), a four-piece aqua and natural wood coffee table, and a diamond-print rug snagged from Wayfair.

Oh, and the floor: That was brand new -- but, Danielle tells us, not too expensive. "It's veneer," she says. "We wanted a white wash, almost Scandanavian-looking flooring that wasn't actually wood. It only cost about $1 a foot."

Another challenge was the lack of light: Although the office has five windows, they are tiny -- about 12 inches by 12 inches -- which Danielle made pop by framing the borders in teal green -- the same color that lines the north side of the office. "The windows are a unique architectural feature, and so I wanted to highlight them as art pieces," Danielle says. "All the borders are asymmetrical and slightly askew."

Needless to say, we're very thankful for all the work Danielle put into our space, as it's done so much for our collective mood when we're at work. Click through below to see more photos of our office.

Interested in getting your own makeover? Head to homepolish.com and use the promo code "hpxfashionista" for 25 percent off an initial consultation with a designer (expires April 11).

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